MoMA exhibit looks at century of children being marketed

The 30-piece Build the Town building blocks are part of an exhibit of 20th-century toys.

So many think of the 20th century as one of violence that the latest exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, “Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000” almost seems contrarian. But it’s not, really. It’s childhood itself that’s a paradox, both a battlefield and a sacred place, and ultimately the justification for almost anything adults want to do.

“On the one hand, modern design has always wanted to preserve childhood as a space and time unencumbered by conflict and work and all the burdens of being an adult,” says Juliet Kinchin, curator of Modern Design at MoMA, who, with assistant curator Aidan O’Connor, organized “Century of the Child.”

“But the flip side of that is the way children have been implicated in the modern world as a truly major market,” Kinchin continues. “The pressure on kids as consumers pulls them the other direction, toward adulthood and directly into adult concerns. … By the end of the exhibition I think you are wondering whether it is childhood that’s disappearing or adulthood.”

Of course modernism — and the Museum of Modern Art itself — has always had an intimate relationship with childhood, in part because it has always laid claim to the future. Pablo Picasso frequently spoke of wanting to “paint like a child.” MoMA’s founding director, Alfred Barr, had a large collection of Soviet children’s books when he was appointed, and Marie d’Harnoncourt, who succeeded him in 1949, had written several children’s books in the ’30s and amassed one of the largest collections of Mexican toys in the world.

Children have always been “modern” because they are by definition new and by inclination imaginative, willing to complete merely suggestive designs in their own minds.

Many of the paradigms of modern art — interactivity, simplicity of form, bright color, new materials and flatness — apply just as easily to design for children. Half the objects in “Century of the Child” are loans, and they throw the idealistic modernity of global childhood design into relief, from the simplified lines of the first animated cartoon, “Gertie the Dinosaur” (by Winsor McCay, 1914), to Czech-born Ladislav Sutnar’s bright wooden “Build the Town” block set from 1940, to the Arp-like biomorphs in John and Faith Hubley’s 1957 cartoon “History of an *.” Modernist design for kids was determinedly optimistic and cheery, not difficult and critical, like modern art.

Still, nothing is as old as yesterday’s future, and many of the nearly 500 (mostly small) objects on display here can be as sad as the photos of rusting jungle gyms shaped like fin-tailed rockets on Russian playgrounds from the late 1950s.

“One of the specific concerns at the very beginning of the century was social reform, particularly in opposition to child labor,” O’Connor says. Modern design wanted to treat kids like little citizens, committed to building a better, fairer society. But that didn’t change the fact that children are indeed cheap labor, and pretty quiescent about their rights, too, even today. Bright colors and cheaper materials didn’t change that. Or change human nature, either.

childhood dissolves

By the middle of this sprawling show childhood itself begins to dissolve in the mind. That’s partly due to all the ideological struggle in the past century. We’re treated to pedagogical wooden blocks from Germany in the ’20s (“Factory” by Josef Franz Maria Hoffman, long multistory factory sheds accompanied by modernist high-rise towers and smoke stacks); then to Soviet books and posters promoting “modern” electrified trams or state-run spa schools; then to a 1933 board game called “SAKAMPF” {“Socialist Action Struggle”?), which is something like Parcheesi except the board takes the shape of a swastika and the markers are little toy soldiers.

By the time we come to a wartime-era Japanese fan design featuring little kids in Army uniforms and sailor suits standing on either side of a bomb that’s taller than them, the idea of children’s design as agitprop for adult politics is depressingly familiar.

During the lull years of war exhaustion in the 1950s and early ’60s, modernism really got its chance to shape its own future, not to mention its future audience. The idea of “imaginative” design, intended to stimulate creativity, takes over, like the playroom Juliet and Gyorgy Kepes designed for their children in Cambridge in 1949, with its climbable skinned tree trunk, jig-sawed plywood wall, and gorgeous abstract clock. There’s a hint of the Expressionist concept of childhood as “savage” here, but “Century of the Child” is intended to show that view slowly evolving: When America gets rich and immensely powerful, the playroom will become the set of “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.”

“Clocky” is here, the Kepes’ gorgeous idea turned into a talking killjoy shaped like America, and so is the vinyl-upholstered door with the lightning-bolt edge that made Pee-Wee’s entrances dramatic. By the ’90s, design for kids was no longer just a parody of adult design — the way the comics, from their very newsprint beginnings, always were a parody of adult life — but a parody of child design itself. The eroticism and ironic luxury of 20th-century consumerism infuses Pee-Wee’s set, asserting that childhood can in fact be a permanent condition, not unlike the undatable age of “Playhouse’s” lead character.

The Gameboys and other digital toys that close out “Century of the Child” point to the blossoming of eternal possibilities evoked by the tiny screens that will no doubt represent childhood to millions of Americans in coming decades. They fulfill many of the promises of those brightly painted wooden toys in abstract shapes the early modernists loved so much: The images glow with primary colors, they are geometrically simplified and relentlessly upbeat. Screen projections by gamers such as Keita Takahashi (from his “Katamari Damacy,” 2004) are brighter than a Miro and as gleeful as a Murakami.

But somewhere these aspects of childhood design became consumer perks, and kids became customers. And that seems less meaningful than being treated as a future citizen — but still better than being treated as a future soldier.

Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900-2000Where: Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., New York CityWhen: Through Nov. 5. Open 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Saturday-Monday and Wednesday and Thursday (open till 8:30 first Thursday of every month), and 10:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Friday; closed TuesdaysHow much: $25 for adults, $18 for seniors, $14 for students and children younger than 16 admitted free. For more information, call (212) 708-9400 or visit moma.org.